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Donald Trump went on a bigoted tirade this week about “sick” immigrants bringing disease into the country.
It wasn’t the first time for Trump. In the early stages of his first presidential bid, he claimed that Mexican migrants were bringing “tremendous infectious disease” to the U.S. He also recently said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.
This coincides with a troubling trend I’ve noticed on the right: the rise of racist pseudoscience.
Here’s how The New Republic summarized Trump’s remarks at a rally in Michigan on Tuesday:
‘People were sick, we don’t want them coming into our country with contagious diseases, and they have it,’ Trump said, despite the fact that he actively ignored the onset of the global pandemic, lied to the U.S. public about ways to treat Covid-19, and thwarted efforts to develop a vaccine. ‘All of a sudden you see these contagious diseases spreading, and everyone is saying, ‘I wonder where they came from.’ I can tell you where they came from.’
Keep in mind that Trump’s administration — in particular, White House adviser Stephen Miller — devised the policy known as Title 42, which allowed the federal government to turn away asylum-seekers at the border on the grounds that they posed a public health threat because of Covid-19. And Miller has said Trump wants to reinstate a similar policy if he regains the presidency, only this time he’d use claims that immigrants carry tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.
All of this is rooted in racist pseudoscience — Title 42 was widely decried by health experts — and mirrors rhetoric that historically has been used to dehumanize and delegitimize racial and ethnic minorities.
And there’s been a startling resurgence of such pseudoscience within the conservative movement, led by Trump but also aided by popular right-wing figures such as Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It’s a point that Arianna Coghill and Garrison Hayes made for Mother Jones last month. Essentially, Musk has been using his social media platform, X, to promote a fringe account that pushes phrenology, a discredited field of science known for drawing connections between skull size and intellectual capacity. Racists have long used it to question Black people’s intelligence.
Will Stancil, an activist who is now running for the Minnesota House of Representatives, has documented Musk’s promotion of bigoted pseudoscience. You can watch Stancil and Garrison break down what Musk is doing in the Mother Jones video below.
The New Republic’s Greg Sargent said Trump’s anti-immigrant tirades in Michigan were scandalous in and of themselves. I agree — not only because of the apparent ease with which he voiced them, but also how they fit within conservatives’ growing comfort with fascist rhetoric targeting minorities.
Calling immigrants “sick” and spreading junk science that portrays racial and ethnic minorities as mentally subpar, as Trump and Musk have done, are textbook examples.